Wednesdays with Coach Tim: How to be a good training partner

Welcome to the inaugural "Wednesdays with Coach Tim" post!

Every Wednesday will (ideally) feature a post reflecting collaboration between me and my coach, Tim Peterson. Coach Tim has been training BJJ exclusively since he was 15, and received his black belt from Giva Santana in December of 2011.  He's also ridiculously photogenic:

This week we are covering something that is critical to learning BJJ, but that isn't formally taught:  how to be a good training partner.  There are three aspects to being a good training partner: (1) Basic etiquette, (2) drilling, and (3) sparring.

(1) Basic Training Etiquette:

• Come to learn and help your training partners learn
• Coach Tim often says you cannot learn BJJ alone.  You can't learn to submit anyone unless someone is willing to be your grappling dummy and roll with you.  You will not win every time.  A lot of learning comes from getting tapped.  Stop thinking of tapping as "losing" and start thinking of it as learning. 

• Have good hygiene 
• Clean and healthy body 
• BJJ is a close contact sport.  Be kind to your training partners, and keep yourself clean and your skin healthy.  Do not roll with contagious conditions like ringworm, athletes foot, or a cold.  

• Clean gi
• Do not roll if you do not have clean gear to roll in.  Not only does it smell (and yes, an unwashed women's gi has a funk to it), but it is unsafe for you and your training partners.  Unwashed gis and gear increase the likelihood of a staph infection.  And seriously, no one wants to be the smelly kid. 

• Trimmed nails
• Fingernails and toenails must be kept short and free of jagged edges.  Not only can a nail seriously harm your training partner, but it can get bent backwards or ripped off if it snags on a gi.  Carry clippers with you and double check your nails before class. 

• Make-up free 
• I violate this one on accident all the time, but women who roll should carry some sort of make up remover cloth with them and try to get rid of as much make-up as possible before class.  You don't want your mascara staining your training partner's gi! 

• Smile
• I overheard Mike Martinez, one of my very favorite coaches and an amazing human being, telling a little boy crying after losing a tournament that if he wasn't having fun, he wasn't doing BJJ.  I've kept that little piece of advice with me, and it has helped me keep my head straight when I'm rolling.  BJJ is a tough sport, mentally and physically.  If you aren't having fun, why are you doing it?

(2) Drilling

• Picking a Drilling Partner 
• When I first started training, I had no idea who I was supposed to train with.  Luckily, I was one of two women training and that made it pretty easy.  I'll be honest that we picked each other because we were the only women, but we also made pretty good training partners because we were the relatively the same height and weight.  Finding a drilling partner the same height and weight is important, especially when you start out, so that you aren't trying to figure out how to deal with someone 100 pounds bigger or 6 inches shorter than you in addition to mastering a completely foreign movement.  

• When there are both women and men on the mat, often women are the last to match up with a training partner.  Why?  Because the awkward goes both ways! Women are more likely to be newer at BJJ and not know as many people, and men (I think) are nervous drilling with someone who is (often) much smaller.  My solution?  Come early to class and introduce yourself around to the people stretching and warming up.  Get a feel for who is attending the class, and who is your size, and do the asking when it comes time to pick drilling partners.  The more you come to class, the more people you get to know, and the easier it is to pick a training partner.

• Drilling -- To be a limp noodle or a stiff cockroach?
• Neither! 

• Coach Tim's Advice: 
  
  
  1) A good visual guide for being a drilling partner is to try to imitate what the instructor was doing during demonstration. For example, if your instructor is teaching the armlock from the closed guard without a follow-up sweep, then during drilling the person being submitted should maintain enough tension in their body so that they don't topple over. Remember that you are generally trying to emulate your instructor's movements as closely as possible, so having your training partner imitate the sequence during instruction is vital!
  
  
  2) A good tactile guide for being a good drilling partner is to remember that tension in your core is always important and tension from your limbs is less important. An example might be useful:
  
  
   Using the same instance of the armlock from the guard we can see how core tension is appropriate. If you are using the armlock on your training partner and they have slack in their core (their abs / hips / glutes are not engaged at least slightly), then the steps that comprise the armlock (moving their arm across your body, pivoting to the side, breaking their posture and finishing the arm lock) ALL have the potential to cause your partner to topple over in an unrealistic fashion. However, if you partner maintains 20% - 50% of their tension in their core and keeps their limbs relatively relaxed, it will be easy to move their arm and drill the submission without having them a) topple over during a transition that wouldn't translate to sparring b) resisting so much with their arms that the position cannot be practiced. This is because keeping tension in your core forces your spine (from your head to your pelvis) to move in unison, which is always our goal.
  
  
  On the other hand, if you maintain tension in your limbs but not your core, you are ingraining a habit of relying on limb strength instead of generating force from your body in a unified manner. To check for core tension, have your partner lie down on their back and lift their feet and knees off the ground as if you were going to practice a bullfighter pass on them. If your partner has tension in their core, pushing their knees slightly to one side will cause the entirety of their upper body to begin rotating in that same direction, albeit not always the same amount that the knees rotate. If they lack core tension, then their knees will flop to the side while their head will still be facing straight forward. In this instance, simply lifting the back of your head off the mat will usually engage your core enough for drilling purposes.

(3) Sparring

• Picking a Sparring Partner 
• Picking a sparring partner seems scary, seems like it should be complicated, but it is exactly the same as picking a drilling partner.  At first, focus on people who are your own size.  As you get more advanced, you may feel more comfortable trying sparring partners with different body types.  If you notice someone standing on the side without a partner, and you want to roll, ask them if they are still rolling.  

• Safety first:  If there is a person at your academy who has hurt you during sparring or drilling, who goes too hard, who has a bad attitude, or in general makes you nervous about sparring with them you are allowed to politely decline an offer to roll with them.  If your academy matches people up, feel free to talk with your instructor privately if there is a particular training partner you would like to avoid for safety reasons.  

• Sparring -- how hard is too hard? 
• One of the things I love about BJJ is that, unlike a lot of other martial arts, you can go 100% in sparring.  That said, if you spar like you are competing in the finals of the IBJJF World Championships in the Pyramid, you aren't going to have very many sparring partners who regularly want to put their bodies through that kind of aggressive roll. 

• Coach Tim's Advice: 
  
  
  Sparring is too hard if someone gets injured or is sparring while on the threshold of being injured. In general, the more experienced individual will match the intensity of the less experienced individual. With that in mind, if you are rolling with someone of a higher rank, it is great to have a hard sparring session, but keep in mind that if you set a certain pace, you are generally expected to maintain that pace for the entire round. Having someone try to take my head off is great practice for me, but if they accidentally poke me in the eye, knee me in the face and then retire to the edge of the mat from exhaustion after 2 minutes, then something is wrong!
  
  
  Another good rule of thumb is that there are three general categories of sparring partners: those less experienced than you, those more experienced than you, and those at your approximate level. As long as no one is injured and their is no other glaring physical discrepancy between you and your partner then each of these partner's has a different set of qualities that allow you to improve. 
  
  
  a) Those less experienced allow you to train your worst guards, your escapes, etc. and you can also teach them counters specific to your game so that they can provide reactions for you to practice against, yet still at a speed that allows you to consciously process your follow-up counters.
  
  
  b) Those at your level allow you to test your ability to draw them into your specific game and avoid their game. You can test your conditioning with them since your technical experience may not be enough to get ahead of them. Also, it is great to ask your instructor to watch you roll with people of your level because the feedback from that will be easier to implement into your game.
  
  
  c) Lastly, those above your level allow you to ask questions, train your best positions as hard as you can and also allow you to feel the different methods they use to exert pressure on you. Watching Jiu Jitsu is useful, but feeling Jiu Jitsu is much more important. You want to feel what high-level Jiu Jitsu feels like on a regular basis so that you are constantly trying to re-create that same sensation.